Abstract [en]

An encompassing knowledge interest in this project is to study what happens in the meetingbetween group work and assessment in the pedagogical practice. There seems to be adilemma between the demand for individual assessment of student’s knowledge and abilitiesand the demand of teaching collaboration abilities through group work. A previous studyconcerning teachers’ management of group work as classroom activity (Hammar Chiriac &Forslund Frykedal, 2010) reveals that assessment is a highly relevant factor when organisinggroup work in a school setting. In addition, teachers seem to experience difficulties andacknowledge some challenges and problems about assessing students working in a group. Toour knowledge this is a rather neglected research area and very little attention has been paid toresearch on assessment of students’ performance in collaborative situations.The main purpose in this study is to explore and comprehend teachers’ conceptions ofdifficulties and worries in connection with assessing students in collaborative situations.Furthermore, we intend to scrutinize what knowledge previous research may provide as acontribution to proficiency about assessment of group work.In the empirical study we have applied a grounded theory methodology and data havebeen assembled by means of group interviews. The informants were teachers, from forms 5-9in the nine-year compulsory school in Sweden.Previous research provides little theoretical knowledge or useful tools aiding the teachersin their task but comprises more of self- and peer assessment and how group members couldcontribute to the assessment.The result shows that teachers rather use informal than formal assessment. The informalassessment is mostly done by circulating in the classroom and observing the groups.Additionally, the result discloses that the teachers have difficulties to concretize and putwords on what and how they assess. In the discussion we present some pedagogicalimplications, which may be useful in the pedagogical practice. The pedagogical implicationsare based on empirical results and previous research.